Trip to England 2009 – Day One – The British Airways Face to Face Events | Anglotopia

The View from our Room in the Park Lake Hilton

Editor’s Note: This is the first part in a week long series about our fantastic trip to England last week. If you’d like to see the rest of the posts about our journey, click here.

Preface

In case you’re new to the blog I thought I should give a brief explanation as to how we got to go on the trip. Basically we won a contest. British Airways held a contest called the Face of Opportunity – and it’s premise was the businesses are more successful if you conduct meetings and deals face to face instead of via the phone or e-mail. So, they launched a brilliant contest to help small business owners achieve their goals by facilitating those face to face meetings.

You had to write an essay on how winning the contest would help your business. Since Anglotopia is starting to turn into a small business – I threw my hat in the ring and entered. I basically had to argue for why a trip to Britain would be valuable to Anglotopia. So, I wrote the essay about how I would get a chance to meet some of my columnists, meet some connections face to face and do some research for the blog for the next year.

It convinced them – and I was notified that I won while I was in Atlanta for Dragon*Con. It was a dream come true. I had been working for nearly three years to get us back to England and this was our chance. So, on November 17th, 2009 – we headed to the airport for the Face to Face series of events.

Our trip breaks down as follows – the first 2 days were spent with British Airways for the events they held. The third day – we had in London to give our Lisa of Distpatches from the North a tour of the town, for the fourth and fifth days, we rented a car and drove to Dorset where we got a tour of Salisbury from Matt Penny and stayed in a self catering cottage in Shaftesbury for two nights called Updown Cottage. During our time in Dorset we visited the seaside in Weymouth and explored the back country roads of Dorset. On our last day we drove to the Airport and headed home. It was a whirlwind trip and it was a dream.

So, what follows is a more detailed journal of our trip. I hope you enjoy reading it!

Day One – British Airways Face to Face Events

We got a lift to the airport from my best friend Chad – who is a bit of an Anglophile himself but hasn’t had a chance to go to England yet. I planned the day to arrive early at O’hare airport – I wanted to make sure that I didn’t miss anything! We arrived at the airport at about 12:30 and even though we were an hour early, check in had already started and there was pretty much no line.

It was our fastest British Airways check in experience yet. Everyone was so nice, especially the British Airways staff. We did well in the seat lottery and managed to snag World Traveller Plus seats, which meant that we would heave bigger seats and more legroom. Having spent most of my journeys to England stuck in coach – this was going to be a fantastic treat – but it would be the first of many.

After we checked in – we hit up the McDonalds in the airport to fill up on food incase I didn’t like any of the food provided by BA (I’m a very picky eater). Once we finished eating, we got in the very long security line and got through in about 20 minutes.

Now, one of the things we were most looking forward to was being able to see the inside of the British Airways Terrace lounge – something we had never thought we would be able to do. All the events for the day were being held in the lounge. One we got inside there was free champange, a huge buffet of free food and ample seating.

Standing Room Only in the Terrace Lounge

We were expected to mingle and network before the festivities started but I’m not much of a networker so we didn’t meet too many people. It would have been cool if the staff had played some introduction type games, you know to loosen everyone up and put e-mail addresses to faces. Oh well.

We did manage to meet some really good peeps – Jeanette Balleza from Scribe Marketing and her partner Will Collins from Archetype Productions. It was refreshing to meet another young couple working in the same fields as us. Ironically they also won 2nd place in the recent Moonfruit contest and are going to Japan next year (they beat me, I was 9th place). Definitely going to keep in touch with them!

About an hour or so before the flight there were many speeches to prepare us for our jouney and they were very interesting. The most interesting thing we heard was from the folks at Think London – a public private partnership that seeks to encourage businesses to move to London – they have a program called Touchdown London that provides free office space for a year for new businesses to setup shop in London. Very cool. Now, if only Anglotopia had venture capital!

After the speeches were through, Jackie and I were done with being cooped up in the lounge so we grabbed our bags, went outside and waited by the gate for boarding to begin. Words could not describe how excited we were!

Our Magic Carpet to London Awaits

We boarded the plane pretty quickly and found our seats, which were pretty much perfect. We stowed our bags, took a look at all the free swag that BA, Think London and UKTI gave us and after a short wait, we took off (which was very smooth).

The Kick Ass British Airways World Traveller Plus Cabin

The flight to London was about 7 hours or so, we had a good tailwind. The food on the flight was pretty good and we were lucky that the plane had an On Demand video system, so you could choose what to watch when you were ready to watch it. The legroom in World Traveller plus is AWESOME and I really do think that we’ll pay the extra money in the future to sit in that cabin instead of cheaping out and sitting in coach.

The cabin service was fantastic – they provided free British newspapers which was fantastic and helped get us mentally prep for touchdown in London. I watched the movie 500 Days of Summer which I didn’t particularly care for much at all. I watched some British TV on the iPhone. I did not get any sleep, though I tried. I just cannot sleep on a plane. I was just too damn excited that I was going to be in London in a matter of hours. I hadn’t been there in 3 years – how COULD I sleep?

Many people networked on the flight but we pretty much stayed in our seats and relaxed. There would be time for networking later. In what seemed like a flash = we arrived in London at about 7am (which was about 1am at home in Chicago).

Check back tomorrow to hear all about our arrival in London and the awesome British Airways events for the day.

Author Info - Jonathan is a consummate Anglophile with an obsession for Britain that borders on psychosis. He keeps Anglotopia running in his spare time, always dreaming of his next trip to England, wishing he lived there - specifically Dorset - and is always trying to figure out a way to move to England. It will happen one day. Keep up with him on Twitter here. Read more from this author